Deadly Sins and Heavenly Virtues: On the Timeless Duality of Being Human

“When I look back upon my life
It’s always with a sense of shame
I’ve always been the one to blame
For everything I long to do.”

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–Pet Shop Boys, “It’s a Sin” (1987)
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On Vice

Seen from behind, the woman in the red dress’s face is only visible to us because of the mirror into which she is gazing, held aloft by a spindly black reptilian demon; the man is in repose, while his lover in her black dress and white habit sits beneath the canvas of a vermillion tent, the couple’s conjugal recreations briefly in intermission while they are entertained by a pair of fools; a corpulent burgher in a scratchy green tunic stretched tight over his ample belly gnaws at a chicken bone while clutching a tankard of beer as he pushes his hungry son away from him; in parallel to the lazy dog curled and dozing at his feet, a man in heavy green velvet sleeps upright in his stiff wooden chair, with the dream of a stern, black-clad nun imploring him to abandon such acedia standing at his right; a wealthy man with pet hawk on wrist absent-mindedly stands while his servants unload his wares, as from a doorway a modest couple stares on in green-eyed covetousness; the rich merchant’s compatriot, a judge, hears deliberations from an attorney while sitting on the wooden bench of an al fresco courtroom, a thatched-roof cottage beyond, while with his right hand he slyly accepts a bribe from opposing counsel; finally, two inebriated peasants, their faces twisted into a cruel rage, run toward each other with swords held aloft, their battle interrupted by a maiden who desperately tries to separate them. All of these scenes are arranged in a circle apportioned into seven equal sections, almost as if infernal place settings upon a table or diabolical hours on a clock.

In the four corners of the composition are an equivalent number of smaller circles, each depicting one of the last things—Heaven and Hell, Judgment and Death—the remains of both vice and virtue. In Heaven, a multitude of the virtuous are admitted by St. Peter into the celestial kingdom beneath the benevolent gaze of Christ; in Hell, the sinful are tortured by an assemblage of bestial demons, women and men splayed out on racks and stabbed with knives underneath the ash-black sky of a burning pit; Christ floats in judgment above the multitude, accompanied by a host of triumphant angels, while in the final entry, a man on his deathbed anxiously awaits the chime of the bells, an angel and demon visible only to him weighing the measure of his soul.

The Seven Deadly Sins and the Four Final Things by either Hieronymus Bosch or his student, painted c. 1500 with the original in Madrid’s Prado Museum.

More than five centuries ago, only eight years after Columbus’s slipper touched the white sands of San Salvador and seventeen prior to Luther’s hammer hitting the door of the Wittenberg Cathedral, either Hieronymus Bosch or a student of his purchased from a Brabant merchant a rectangle of Dutch poplar about five feet long and four feet wide and with oils as red as blood and as blue as Heaven, as green as the earth and as black as death, painted the aforementioned scenes in a composition entitled The Seven Deadly Sins and the Four Last Things. An entire moral universe recorded on wood from a tree felled in the Low Countries more than half a millennium ago, the vagaries of pride, lust, gluttony, sloth, envy, greed, and wrath rendered in exacting detail, and the costs of such transgressions indicated in the corners of the piece.

Imagine, then, a progressive restoration of the Seven Deadly Sins as not just a moral guide, but a moral guide based in the material conditions of the world.

Bosch, long celebrated for his cracked visions of corpuscular demons deep within the ravines of the earth, of surreal, nightmarish imagery called forth from a festering creative abscess, is relatively tame in this painting (despite the occasional devil here or there). Yet the image is no less arresting because of it, particularly as Bosch (or somebody in his stead) illustrated the sins as a circle (so evocative of the infamous wheel of fortune), harkening to the variability and inevitability of moral failing in all of our lives. At the center of Bosch’s (or his student’s) tableau is a small depiction of Christ, omniscient and omnipresent, a panopticon and all-seeing eye, sitting in condemnation of these minor foibles that so often can metastasize into grievous sin—for envy can turn into robbery, lust into rape, wrath into murder. Within the canon of the Roman Catholic Church, that is to say that the cardinal sins—those minor peccadillos and forgivable oversights, our vanities and appetites—can lead to mortal scenes. The Seven Deadly Vices may not themselves constitute the portal to Hell, but if unchecked they can be the key.

Seven days of creation, seven sacraments, seven wonders of the world and hills of Rome. So overdetermined is seven, that prime number associated by numerologists with divinity itself, that it feels expected that there would of course be a listing of Seven Deadly Sins. More surprising is that the list itself appears nowhere in Scripture, for in our secular age, where literacy of the Bible has become a rare virtue, there is perhaps an assumption that the Seven Deadly Sins are first encountered in the Hebrew Scriptures or the New Testament. Historically, though the Church Father Evagrius Ponticus drew upon classical precedents, any listing of fundamental sins which could lead to further perdition was first made by that fourth-century theologian who lived along the Bithynian coast of Asia Minor. Believing that the source of disunion could be physical, mental, or emotional, Ponticus attempted to tally all of those moods and dispositions that can lead to mortal sins and settled on eight, rather than seven (listing “sadness” as a sin). As translated into Latin by his younger contemporary John Cassian, the Eight Deadly Sins became a staple of spiritual contemplation among Catholics of the early Middle Ages.

Pope Gregory I, the sixth-century pontiff who was the first to have the superlative “the Great” added after his name, redacted Ponticus’s inventory from eight into seven, combining sadness into “Acedia,” the rough modern corollary to sloth, while also more fully explicating the nature of envy. What exactly these individual sins might encompass and how they might be interpreted has changed over the course of many centuries, but since Gregory the Great the listing has remained uniform (even while a commitment to the Seven Deadly Sins themselves as a moral guide has declined over the past half millennium). Despite the relative disinterest which theologians have had in the subject since the Reformation, the Seven Deadly Sins have so long fascinated the general public in part because they describe average, regular, boring failures. To think too highly of oneself, to eat and drink too much, to find one’s eye wandering toward unclothed flesh or to slack off at tasks, to desire something that doesn’t belong to you or to stingily hold on too tightly to that which does, and finally to feel your blood pressure rise in anger, your palms go clammy with rage—well, it would take a saintly person to claim that they’ve never experienced these, or something near enough. Most of us (hopefully) aren’t murderers or war criminals, but that we’re a bit too proud or a bit too envious, sometimes lustful or gluttonous, lazy, greedy, or angry, is simply the lot of humanity.

Otto Dix’s 1933 “The Seven Deadly Sins,” original at the Staatliche Kunsthalle in Karlsruhe, Germany.

Because of their universality, and the seeming exhaustiveness of the listed transgressions that seem neither too few nor too many, the sins have often been a subject of great art and literature. Dante’s epic The Divine Comedy, the first third of which deals with the poet’s harrowing of Hell as guided by his Roman antecedent Virgil, provides a detailed cosmology of how the sinful are punished at the various circles of perdition. There is the second circle, where the lustful are forever buffeted about on eternal winds, the adulterous lovers Francesca da Rimini and Paolo Malatesta—condemned for an instance of rank carnality encouraged by a romance about Guinevere and Lancelot which they read together—tell Dante that “Love, which permits no loved one not to love, / took me so strongly with delight in him / that we are one in Hell, as we were above.” In a circle below, the gluttonous wallow in their own fetid crapulence, the sweat and stank from their corpulent bodies, the flicks of spit-slicked food from the corners of their mouths, now a deep cesspool in which they eternally drown. The greedy, once with addresses on Florence’s Ponte Vecchio, or maybe Park Avenue or Rodeo Drive, now rather reside in the fourth circle, where they are forced by demons to joust with one another with the treasures they once hoarded, a “nation of lost souls, / far more than were above: they strained their chests / against enormous weights, and with mad howls/rolled them at one another.” There are nine circles in all, where not just the classical Seven Deadly Sins, but also heresy and treachery, among others, are punished with an exacting logic, all of which is enumerated by Dante in a complex topography of circles within circles, of vestibules and antechambers.

An obvious reciprocal logic animates “Inferno,” whereby sins are punished in a manner in keeping with their appearance, a diabolical irony that sees the lustful whisked about in passionate vortices and the greedy weighed down by their own wealth. This has often been the obscene enjoyment of thinking about the Seven Deadly Sins, for nearly two millennia they have been represented in such a manner. David Fincher’s grim, gothic, macabre 1995 noir film Se7en, in which a wizened old cop, played by Morgan Freeman, and his hotheaded new partner, portrayed by Brad Pitt, pursue a serial killer who gruesomely murders his victims by the logic of the Seven Deadly Sins, is probably the most popular contemporary example (it is certainly how most people remind themselves of just what exactly is on that original list). A morbidly obese man forced to gorge himself to death, a lay-about parasite strapped into a bed until he is transformed into a living cadaver covered in sores and pustules, a financier who bleeds out after being made to cut out a pound of his own flesh. “If we catch John Doe and he turns out to be the Devil—I mean, if he’s Satan himself,” says Freeman’s character, Detective William Somerset, “that might live up to our expectations. But…he’s not the Devil. He’s just a man.” Which has always been the point of not just the classification of the Seven Deadly Sins, but of the moral sins which are their progeny—that they’re committed not by devils, but men.

Some of the most arresting portrayals of the Seven Deadly Sins come in the form of the morality plays which were performed at open-air festivals and during feast days throughout medieval Europe. The Seven Deadly Sins were personified as characters visible to a soul strung between Heaven and Hell, paradise and perdition, goading a person on into the transgressions which ultimately lead to those wicked acts that earn somebody continual punishment. Part of what makes these characters so compelling, such as in the fourteenth-century anonymous English play Everyman, is that they can be interpreted as aspects of the human psyche, as elements of our multifaceted and polyglot, labyrinthine and intricate minds. Ambiguity as to where the sins come from implies that we condemn ourselves. “The tyde abydeth no man,” warns Death in the play. This dramatic conceit of a beautiful Pride, obese Gluttony, and gold-bedecked Greed existing as not just broad archetypes, but as personages capable of convincing the fallible mind into sin, was still apparent in the earliest days of the secular theater, even after the Reformation. Richard Tarlton’s lost 1585 play The Seven Deadly Sins is an obvious example, though less celebrated than Christopher Marlowe’s 1593 play Doctor Faustus, wherein all of the sins arrive in their expected forms to discourse with the condemned scholar who has sold his soul to Satan. “If we say that we have no sin, / We deceive ourselves, and there’s no truth in us,” writes Marlowe.

Again, this is part of the theological significance of the Seven Deadly Sins, their moral power, ethical power, psychological power. The list of sins is pedestrian, prosaic, basic, and quotidian, a summation of the “banality of evil” long before Hannah Arendt coined that phrase in her study Eichman in Jerusalem, describing the Nazi functionary who was personally responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Hungarian Jews. Part of what Arendt’s controversial account suggested was that a man like Eichmann, far from being an incomprehensible monster, was all the more chillingly just an average person, like me or you. Yet sin shall pluck upon sin, the further somebody sinks into blood. As an ethical guide, it’s this aspect that makes the Seven Deadly Sins compare in marked contrast to the abstractions and absolutism of other moral theories ranging from the Golden Rule to the eighteenth-century philosopher Immanuel Kant’s categorical imperative. Most importantly, the Seven Deadly Sins—as a diagnostic tool, if not also as a set of instructions for how to actually live—is far preferable to the strictures of the Decalogue, a moral code which does actually appear in Scripture.

The Ten Commandments as explicated in Exodus share a similar concern as does the listing of the Seven Deadly Sins, yet the former is ironically both more and less strict in what it proscribes. More strict because it’s definitive in what thou shouldst and shouldnst do, but less in that the rules themselves become easier to follow than the broad and ambiguous guidelines of the Seven Deadly Sins. The Decalogue trades in certainty—Thou shalt not murder, thou shalt not commit adultery, thou shalt not steal—while the Seven Deadly Sins are more equivocal. Avoid gluttony, but how much can I eat? Eschew sloth, so how many hours should I rest? Greed is a sin, but how then should I best make my livelihood? By contrast, the Ten Commandments actually ask less of us; to not murder or steal should be comparatively easy. In that the laws of Exodus are so clear-cut, the punishments (whether civil or cosmic) are also more obvious, but those rules are also easier to follow. The result, counterintuitively, is that a culture which places more stock in the Decalogue than in the Seven Deadly Sins is a culture where the standards of what it means to be good are at a base minimum.

Pride, lust, gluttony, sloth, envy, greed, and wrath are not archaic remnants of a distant past…they are the apparatus by which we fully measure the fallenness of this world.

Such is our culture, obviously. The shift from seeing the locus of wisdom in the Seven Deadly Sins to rather the Ten Commandments has been a five-century process. Scholar John Bossy explains that the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries saw an alteration in Christianity’s “moral arithmetic,” where both Reformation Protestants and Counter-Reformation Catholics traded away the grand ethical edifice of the Seven Deadly Sins for the constraints of the Ten Commandments, in large part because the former didn’t have scriptural precedent. In an epoch where faith in a traditional god is a more absurd leap than self-evident truth, who cares about the Decalogue’s injunctions concerning idolatry and blasphemy? If the most that we can ask of treatment to our neighbors is that we don’t murder them, then we’ve made the bare minimum of good behavior the basis for society. Imagine, then, a progressive restoration of the Seven Deadly Sins as not just a moral guide, but a moral guide based in the material conditions of the world. We’re in need of such guidance at this particular juncture in history, for the Decalogue offers no prescriptions on the inequities which the Seven Deadly Sins always kept at the forefront.

Fundamentally, from Ponticus onward, the sins were always defined as being attitudes which deprive the least of us from an equitable share of what human beings deserve. More than just being about morality, the Seven Deadly Sins are about justice. To talk about gluttony, where some enjoy Almas caviar and Romanée-Conti while 828 million people a day go to bed hungry, is to talk about justice. To discuss how two billion women, men, and children—a quarter of the globe’s population—are victims of wrath living in active war zones from Syria to Haiti, is to have a discussion about justice. To understand that the greed of this planet’s 2,153 billionaires led to an accumulation of wealth equal to that of the 4.6 billion people of the rest of the planet is to only begin to take the measure of injustice. Pride, lust, gluttony, sloth, envy, greed, and wrath are not archaic remnants of a distant past, medieval relics fit only for Dante—they are the apparatus by which we fully measure the fallenness of this world.

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“Sail on silver girl
Sail on by
Your time has come to shine
All your dreams are on their way
See how they shine.”

–Simon & Garfunkel, “Bridge Over Troubled Water” (1970)
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On Virtue

The population of the earth on September 26, 1983, was around 4.685 billion women, men, and children, and most of them would have been killed in under forty-five minutes during an all-out nuclear exchange between the Soviet Union and the United States if it hadn’t been for a quick, and arguably irrational, decision made by a lieutenant colonel in the Soviet Air Defense services named Stanislav Petrov. In his official military identification photograph taken that same year, Petrov is an unremarkable man with a bouffant of swept-back black hair and a slight widow’s peak, thin with high cheekbones, big ears, and unmistakable Slavic eyes. His green coat is decorated in several minor medals awarded by the USSR, but his most significant action never received official commemoration from his nation. That autumn evening in question, Petrov was stationed in the secret city of Serpukhov-15, around twenty miles south of Moscow, where he monitored computers deep within the subterranean command center of the Soviet nuclear missile early-warning system.

Coincidentally, a little under eight thousand miles away, a series of low storm clouds rolled in over the cold plains of North Dakota while a Soviet spy satellite which was part of the Oko warning system happened to be in orbit above. Rather than the rumble of a plains thunderstorm, the satellite detected one, and then four more, LGM-30 Minuteman intercontinental ballistic missiles being launched by the United States. In less than a minute, that information was relayed to Petrov, who sat a hemisphere away in front of his black computer screen with its blinking green Cyrillic letters. His responsibility—his military oath—was to immediately contact the next in the chain-of-command, so that in less than fifteen minutes the Kremlin would have the information needed to justify a retaliatory strike against the United States, and yet the lieutenant colonel performed the most radical act of goodness which has perhaps ever happened—he did nothing.

Italian Renaissance painter Andrea Mantegna’s 1502 The Triumph of the Virtues, original at the Louvre.

“My late wife for ten years knew nothing about it,” Petrov told a documentary film reporter in 2012. “‘So what did you do?’ she asked me. ‘Nothing. I did nothing.’” In later interviews, first with higher-ranking officers in the Soviet military and then Western journalists after the end of the Cold War, Petrov maintained that even though he acted in direct violation of his training, his gut feeling that night was eminently commonsensical, he having reasoned that the United States wouldn’t begin a nuclear exchange with only five missiles, and thus (correctly) assuming that the alert was merely computer error. Had somebody else been on shift that September evening, or had Petrov reacted by the dictates of Soviet military bureaucracy, then undoubtedly Moscow would have responded with a nuclear attack on the West, which the U.S. erroneously would have believed was an act of retaliation. Had this come to pass, about half an hour after Petrov had received that alert, New York, Washington, DC, Los Angeles, Chicago, and San Francisco would be incinerated, followed by London, Paris, and Toronto.

Regardless of the American military brass instantaneously killed at the Pentagon, those missile silos in North Dakota, now dappled in the cool rain from those clouds perilously misinterpreted as missiles less than an hour before, would still open up their vast chasms upon the earth, nuclear-tipped projectiles sent back toward the Soviet Union, so that less than sixty minutes after Petrov received his alert, Leningrad, Gorky, Saratov, Kazan, Tbilsi, and Moscow would be erased as well. Joseph Stalin was responsible for almost nine million deaths, Adolph Hitler for thirteen million between World War II and the Holocaust, while this nameless, faceless bureaucrat with minimal power and seemingly no ego was responsible for saving four billion lives. Stalin, Hitler, Mao, Mussolini, Franco, Pinochet, Pol Pot, Idi Amin, and Saddam Hussein were responsible for untold horror, bloodshed, and evil in their lives, motivated by overweening pride, but an unremarkable man named Petrov was able to save more lives than the rest of those monsters were ever able to take.

“Imaginary evil is romantic and varied,” wrote the French Jewish philosopher Simone Weil in her 1943 Gravity and Grace. “real evil is gloomy, monotonous, barren, boring.” Weil foreshadows Hannah Arendt’s two-decades-later argument in Eichman in Jerusalem about the “banality of evil,” an observation about how we imagine evil as perpetrated by evocative creatures like Hannibal Lecter, Dracula, and Lucifer, but that the reality is far more prosaic—boring men doing hideous things, atrocities committed by dim-witted and uninteresting people who might as well be insurance salesmen and yet are capable of the most twisted actions. Weil writes that by contrast, “Imaginary good is boring; real good is always new, marvelous, intoxicating.” There seems to be a paradox here, for Petrov himself seems precisely that sort of boring figure, a minor military functionary in pressed uniform sitting in front of a computer screen, a man so dry he couldn’t even be bothered to tell his wife about the time that he saved the world. Yet this is a good that makes Weil’s point, because this figure—just as much of a seeming insurance salesman as Arendt’s banal evildoer—is new, marvelous, and intoxicating. That such an average, regular person was capable of not just evil, but of good, is as beguiling and beautiful as any fact which can be conceived of.

Imagine yourself in Petrov’s situation in 1983. What gave him the fortitude not to immediately contact those above him so as to initiate a military response? Was it principle, fear? Were the alert accurate, Petrov and everybody else at Serpukhov-15 would be dead shortly enough, for had the United States launched ICBMs toward the Soviet Union it was already too late for Moscow to do anything other than to respond in revenge. Did Petrov know that and decide that even if he was to die—even if he was to be the victim of a monstrous evil in the form of a preemptive strike—he would unilaterally make the decision not to inform his superiors so that at least half the world’s children would survive World War III? Or perhaps his self-effacing modesty at having simply done his job is the closest to the truth: Petrov really was knowledgeable enough about the nuances of false alerts to be able to recognize a blinking alarm as merely signaling some storm clouds on the other side of the planet. Maybe it’s all of these, or perhaps it’s none. I suspect Petrov himself, lying in bed at night and reflecting on that fateful choice, must have wondered which it was. Or maybe not—maybe radical good simply accepts what it is.

Goodness is neither wisdom nor wealth; ironically, like evil, in its purest form good is not instrumental, utilitarian, or even pragmatic.

Weil’s point about goodness is best paired with Arendt’s observation about evil, for the former is just as important, and in some manner just as surprising. So much of our attention is spent parsing the intricacies of the sociopath’s brain, the evil man’s soul, but it’s not often enough that we similarly acknowledge just how strange and counterintuitive radical goodness can be. The bystander who jumps onto subway tracks to save the life of a stranger whose name they don’t even know, the volunteer who painfully donates bone marrow or a kidney for somebody whom they will never meet, the good Samaritan who risks—and perhaps loses—their life in the act of defending somebody from an assailant, or by running into a burning house, or by pushing a person out of the way of a wayward car and gets hit in the process.

A mysterious force, every bit as ineffable as radical evil, the word “virtue” hardly seems fully appropriate for a phenomenon as revolutionary as pure goodness. “Virtue” has connotations of the maudlin, mid-century youth behavior-control propaganda “Goofus and Gallant” from Highlights magazine, or of the schmaltzy Claymation series Davey & Goliath produced by the Lutheran Church. The word, for better or worse, doesn’t evoke radical goodness so much as it does being prim, prudish, puritanical, where the virtuous are a category that includes teetotalers, those who go to bed and get up early, clean and polite young people who eschew cuss words, and those who pass on dessert. There is nothing fun or sexy about virtue. This, I would argue, is a problem more with the word (or at least with the associations it has accrued over the generations) then it is with the quality itself. For if it’s true that the listing of virtues compiled by the Church had something to do with social control, with behavior modification that keeps people docile and pliable, it’s also true that goodness itself is an evergreen subversive quality, where to wish good and do good and be good are a means of challenging the inequity and cruelty that is too often the rule of this world.

Because goodness is so often understood, contra Weil’s argument, as boring, there is much less focus on the Seven Capital Virtues in our popular culture than there is on the Seven Deadly Sins (check which half of this book is longer, after all). There is, for example, no converse of David Fincher’s film Se7en, where do-gooders go around rewarding people for their humility or kindness, where a noble activist receives an anonymous financial contribution or a humble volunteer is given an award. Indeed, even the Church itself seemed content to be a bit more inconsistent with listing virtue than vice. The collection explored here are the Seven Capital Virtues, which are different from the Seven Heavenly Virtues, themselves composed of Four Cardinal Virtues and Three Theological Virtues, though it should be said that confusingly, there are attributes shared and similar across all of these variable enumerations. The Three Theological Virtues are the oldest of any such listing—predating the Seven Deadly Sins by four centuries—and the only ones which are explicitly mentioned in Scripture.

Dealing with virtues connected to belief, Paul in his epistle to the Corinthians writes, “And now faith, hope, and love abide, these three; and the greatest of these is love,” a moving sentiment from an apostle not often associated with them. The Four Cardinal Virtues took as their purview not belief, but action, first listed by Ambrose in the fourth century and then reaffirmed by his student Augustine; they are temperance, justice, prudence, and fortitude. Joined together, the cumulative seven of the theological and cardinal virtues were a schema that defined right belief and behavior, though they differ from the Capital Virtues, even while some remain the same (temperance, for example). Those Seven Capital Virtues, the ones which will be explored in the present volume, were formulated in direct reaction to their far more famous cousins of the Seven Deadly Sins.

Prudentius, an Iberian Latin poet of the fifth century living through the collapse of empire, was the first author to imagine the human mind as a battlefield between seven virtues and vices, in his psychologically astute Psychomachia. Long before modernists abandoned the simplistic Enlightenment myth of a unitary mind, of the Cogito in full and rational control of its faculties, Prudentius described how “War rages, horrid war / Even in our bones; our double nature sounds / With armed discord.” The title of his poem directly translating to “soul war,” Prudentius understood that to be human is to be strung between Heaven and Hell, to be capable of the most touching tenderness and cold cruelty, the most radiant goodness and the most wicked evil, sometimes within the single individual. Contradiction and paradox are our lot far more than boring consistency, with Psychomachia enacting that disunion. “Body of a man I bring thee,” sings Prudentius’s celestial choirs, “Noble even in its ruin.” Prudentius didn’t rely on the earlier list of the Cardinal Virtues in composing his own; rather, his character list (for they are humanized as personalities) is composed of Faith, Chastity, Patience, Humility, Sobriety, Good Works, and Concordia (the last roughly equivalent to agreeableness). Here the enumeration is much closer to the final draft, which would be the Seven Capital Virtues, though there are some important differences (surprisingly, Good Works doesn’t appear in the ultimate version, nor Concordia).

Rather, as described in The Seven Deadly Sins and Seven Heavenly Virtues—humility, chastity, temperance, diligence, kindness, charity, and patience (which I’ve rendered as “peacefulness”)—was finalized, appropriately enough, by the same thinker responsible for the definitive iteration of the Seven Deadly Sins: the sixth-century pontiff Pope Gregory the Great. For more than a millennium, with inevitable shifts in the meaning or implications of each individual virtue and vice, this has been the authoritative listing of both. As understood by Gregory, the virtues and vices in their numerologically significant groupings of seven were a way of understanding in totality the divided consciousness of humanity, whereby each virtue has an equal and opposite vice, binary oppositions riven through the soul of man.

Regardless, the Seven Capital Virtues have never occupied the same space in the artistic consciousness of the West as have the Seven Deadly Sins, for our greater loss. Despite the superficial ways in which the Seven Deadly Sins—Lust! Greed! Wrath!—are fascinating, there is a deeper strangeness to virtue, as Weil would have understood well, that radiates in its own powerful beauty. At their most basic, the Seven Capital Virtues ask of us how we shall lead a good life. Not an enjoyable life, not a productive or even a happy one, but a good life. They ask us how we shall interact with our families, our neighbors, with strangers. As with the ancient Greeks, such “virtue” is a question not of platitudes and pieties, but of excellence, of what it means to engage with the world in a spirit of magnanimity, fairness, charity, and empathy. “For some identify happiness with virtue,” writes Aristotle in the Nicomachean Ethics, “some with practical wisdom, others with a kind of philosophic wisdom…while others include also external prosperity,” and while the philosopher allows that these can all theoretically be related to the good, they are not entirely reducible to it either.

Goodness is neither wisdom nor wealth; ironically, like evil, in its purest form good is not instrumental, utilitarian, or even pragmatic. To be sure, good and evil can be used to further some aim, and perhaps virtue and vice are the shadows cast from Heaven and Hell of those more pure attributes, but in their elemental state, good and evil are singularities; they are foreign and alien. With some irony, it can be noted that there was an equivalent justification given by Stanislav Petrov and Adolph Eichman for what they had done—they were both just doing their job, following orders. But they weren’t; theirs were both acts beyond normal rationality, albeit one was done for pure good and the other for pure evil. To be in the presence of pure good—a moment of pure benevolence, a disinterested sacrifice, a charity, an instance of complete tenderness or kindness—is not unlike being within the presence of pure evil.

That’s not to say that good and evil are the same—not at all. By definition they are complete opposites. It’s to say that good—like evil—is something that when we’ve really experienced it, as either the recipient or dispenser of its fortunes, we may understand just how distant and different the divine is from our prosaic lives, but how it nonetheless also thrums through the particulars of everyday existence as well. Today, in the sweltering summer of collapse, when there seems to be such a deficit of goodness, the virtues themselves radically remind us that the unlikeliest of things—connection, kindness, love—remain not just possible, but common.

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From The Seven Deadly Sins and Seven Heavenly Virtues: A Visual History by Ed Simon. Copyright © 2024. Available from Abrams Books.